Not to be outdone by AOL, Yahoo! has announced the addition of Phone In and Phone Out services to the company's arsenal of Yahoo! Messenger communications services (http://messenger.yahoo.com).

Yahoo! is rolling out two new fee-based services, under the overall name of Yahoo! Messenger with Voice, that deviate a bit in their structure from the unlimited calling plans of many voice over IP (VoIP) services such as AT&T Callvantage, VoicePulse, and Vonage. With the Yahoo! Phone Out service, subscribers can make PC-to-phone calls from anywhere in the world to the U.S. for one cent a minute. International calls can be made to over 180 countries at higher rates, including 30 countries that can be phoned for less than two cents a minute.

With Yahoo!'s other new service, Phone In, subscribers get a personal phone number for receiving incoming calls to their PC from regular phone lines. Users can receive unlimited domestic calls for $2.99 a month or $29.90 a year, and they can purchase prepaid voice credit in $10 and $25 increments.

Subscribers will still initiate their Yahoo! communications through their Contact Card interface window, and Yahoo! Messenger PC-to-PC calls remain free; only calls to or from outside phone lines require the fee-based service. A couple of interesting free enhancements to these services include a new Contact Search Bar within the interface, and Open Talk, which allows instant status messages and connections between PC-to-PC callers. Other services available within the Yahoo! Messenger suite include instant text messaging, e-mail, mobile text messaging, photo sharing, voicemail, Internet Radio, Yahoo! Music, address book, LiveWords, games, and Web cam offerings.

Yahoo!'s new voice services come on the heels of last week's Skype Video rollout bundled with Skype 2.0 Beta. Skype already offered a Skype In and Skype Out voice service. Yahoo! has offered PC-to-PC video calling in Messenger since 2001.

In addition to its rollout in the U.S., the company is launching Messenger with Voice simultaneously in 18 countries, including Germany, France, Spain, and the U.S.

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About the Author

Davis D. Janowski is Lead Analyst for Web Applications and Software, charged with covering the likes of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and millions of other Internet and Web companies. Prior to this, he served as Section Editor for Consumer Networking, GPS Products, Phones & PDAs (Mobile and VoIP); Associate Editor for Networking Infrastructure; and As... See Full Bio

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